Appointment Confirmation Cards - Are They Effective in Lowering Patient No-Shows?

Do you know how much money your practice loses from patients who dont show up for their appointments? Consider this. According to published medical researches average no-show rate in the United States is about 18%. An average practice that schedules 60 patients a day may have up to 10 patients that do not show up for their scheduled appointments. Multiply 10 no-shows by a per visit cost of only $60 and the practice loses approximately $600 a day, $12,000 by the end of the month, $144,000 by the end of the year.

It is apparent that not taking action is the worst way of handling no-shows. So what other options do you have? There are 3 main ways medical groups can fight patient no-shows: phone calls made by office staff, sending patient reminder cards, or using automated appointment confirmation calls. This article will examine the pros and cons of sending appointment reminder cards.

Sending postcards is still a very popular appointment confirmation tool. This is mainly because it is easy to print several thousand postcards. However, it is much more important to find out how efficient sending postcards to patients really is. For an average clinic you will need to send 60 postcards per day. Printing costs for your postcards will cost around 20 cents. Mailing costs are 41 cents. In addition an employee has to spend at least an hour writing appointment times, addresses, adding postage, etc. At an average wage of $10 per hour, your total cost per card will total about 77 cents.

So now that the patient cards are mailed there is nothing else to worry about right? Well, not quite. First you have to send the cards way in advance of the appointment to make sure they arrive on time. So for appointments on Friday you will mail the cards on Monday. However, there is a whole week, to schedule more patients that would not be able to confirm their appointment. In addition, with such a large number of junk mail send to houses every day, you will never know if your patients received the postcard, looked at it and would remember the appointment.

When all is said and done, in this age of technology, sending postcards is expensive, inefficient and results are uncertain. If you are first starting out you should know that making appointment confirmation calls is very important to keep no-shows down, but sending postcards might not be the best solution. That is why hospitals and medical groups across the country are looking at other ways to combat this problem including making manual phone calls or using automated reminder services.

Yuri K. is a marketing manager at ClientTell Corporation, which provides appointment confirmation and lab results reporting for major teaching hospitals and medical groups in the US. To learn more visit ClientTell website at http://www.clienttell.net/

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